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itlHCI MOTOR; 



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THE WORKER AT HOME. 



Addressed to the Good Sense of the Nation, 



BY 






I. HARRINOTON. 



New York : 
PUBLISHED BY THE SOCIAL PROGRESS SOCIETY, 

508 West 57TH Street. 



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THE WORKER AT HOME. 



Addressed to the Good Sense of the Nation. 






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BY 



I. HARRINGTON. 



New York : 
PUBLISHED BY THE SOCIAL PROGRESS SOCIETY, 

508 West 57TH Street. 



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Sunset Before Noon is a book worth its weight in gold. 
Address Isaac Harrington, 

508 West 57th Street, N. Y. 

The Irrepressible Conflict is a book that should set the 
world on fire, and will, if properly considered. 



Copyright, 1888, by I. Harrington. 



THE TEMPERANCE MOTOR; 

OR, 

THE WORKER AT HOME. 



The Right and the Expediency to Legislate. 



^7he opponents of prohibition deny the right to legislate 
v2/ against the sale of intoxicating drinks. They talk about 
sumptuary laws, and say we have no right to dictate 
what the people shall eat, drink, or wear. This artful sophistry 
is not designed to develop, but to cover up truth. Sometimes 
an evil becomes so enormous, that it takes shelter under its 
own prevalence, and argues that it has become a necessary 
part of our civilization. That reminds us of what Mrs. Par- 
tington said the first time she was on a train of steam cars. 
They had a collision and general smash up ; and Mrs. Parting- 
ton said she didn't know but what that was the regular way of 
stopping the cars. 

It is important for every man or woman to know how to 
answer such arguments. The Prohibition Party disclaims all 
right or intention to interfere with the personal freedom of the 
people. The individual has a right to eat, drink, or wear any- 
thing he chooses, so long as he does not interfere with the rights 
of others. He has no right to injure anyone else. The indi- 
vidual must hold himself bound by the great law of 

PUBLIC GOOD, PUBLIC SAFETY, PUBLIC UTILITY. 

The Public Good is the strongest law known to man. It has 
the right of way every time. Before it, all other laws must 
yield. 

The law which secures to a family, the undisturbed possession 



of their own home, is one of the most sacred. Yet if a railroad 
is required by the public good, it may be run through the family 
kitchen, through a gentleman's parlor, or the pleasure grounds 
dedicated to elegant ease and refinement. 

By virtue of this law, the Erie Canal was made and the 
Brooklyn Bridge was built. It is by this law that all railroads, 
canals, telegraphic lines, and all public works are executed. 
When a house becomes unsafe, we order it torn down. When 
a business establishment becomes a nuisance, we order it re- 
moved. When an article of food becomes unhealthful, we order 
it destroyed. When an infected cargo of goods enters our har- 
bor, we order it thrown overboard into the sea. 

All things whatsoever the public good requires, a free people 
may do. The liquor traffic is a standing menace to every 
element of public good. It is estimated that it destroys about 
nine hundred and forty-four millions of dollars worth of the 
means of living every year, or about ninety dollars for every 
voter in the United States. 

That it destroys one hundred thousand lives every year, and 
brings wretchedness to a corresponding number of families, 
and destroys uncounted millions of dollars worth of productive 
labor. Add to these the enormous expenses of detecting and 
punishing crime, supporting paupers and destitute children, and 
even then the half is not told of the private grief, the blasted 
hopes, the ruined prospects, the depraving influences, and the 
hereditary ills that honeycomb society to the third and fourth 
generation, and deteriorate the race. 

All these calamities make the matter no less national than 
individual, and make the very strongest demand for national 
remedies. In view of all these outrages on human society, it 
is nonsense to say that laws to stay the ravages of this in- 
human monster, are merely sumptuary laws that interfere with 
personal freedom. These evils have existed so long, and the 
people have become so accustomed to them, that they cease to 
shock the common sense of mankind. If they had come sud- 
denly upon us they would set the world on fire, and will yet if 
the people can be made to appreciate them in all their gigantic 
proportions. 



THE PHILOSOPHY OF INFLUENCE. 

We have a great lesson to teach to all men, women and chil- 
dren, that all persons are as responsible for their influence as 
they are to pay their honest debts. St. Paul was an example of 
true manhood when he said : " I will eat no flesh while the 
world standeth, lest I make my brother to offend." How much 
more reason there is to say : " I will drink no intoxicating 
drinks while the world stands, lest it cause my brother to 
fall." 

Those called temperate drinkers are responsible for nearly 
all the evils of intemperance. Let them stop drinking, and 
very few would be led into the vice of intemperance. They are 
responsible for the many saloons that curse the land. Take 
away their patronage, and the greater portion of the saloons 
would close for want of support. In any place where the 
judges, the lawyers, the clergymen, and the principal citizens 
take the social glass, young men are in great danger, and all 
attempts to teach temperance will prove abortive. Habitual 
drunkards exert but little influence, and will lead but few 
astray. The popular, the level-headed, the respectable class do 
the mischief. One temperate drinker is more to be dreaded 
than a dozen drunkards. Unless the influential classes can be 
convinced of this, the temperance cause must languish and 
drag its slow length along, like a wounded snake. As the 
temperance men love their cause, they must be earnest, persist- 
ent on this point. Touch not, taste not, handle not, give not, 
receive not. Let it alone ON Paul's plan. Here is the 
heart, soul, spirit of the whole evil. Let no man feel that he 
can hold a neutral position in this matter. The little self-denial 
that he must practice will be light to him, but it is a very 
weighty matter to his country and to his kindred. 

WHY HAS NOT PROHIBITION PROVED MORE 
SUCCESSFUL ? 

Wherever prohibition has been tried it has found a Bull 
Run of difficulties. We once had a prohibitory law in the 
State of New York. Why have we not now ? Also in Massa- 
chusetts. Why not now ? Its failures arose from two causes. 
First, from the influence of those respectable drinkers who 
manufacture public opinion and social usages ; secondly, from 
the fact that those who should have administered the law were 
the enemies of the law, and would not honestly enforce it. The 



friends of prohibition must not underrate these facts, nor the 
importance of a strong, healthy public opinion, having its root 
in the hearts of the influential classes — men who think and feel, 
and are willing to act and be known on the right side of this 
great national question. Public opinion must have backbone, 
or no law in the world can be sustained. This fact is a part of 
the history of jurisprudence. We must educate the public 
mind, line upon line, precept upon precept. We did that be- 
fore we got a prohibitory law. As soon as we got a law, the 
temperance heroes ceased to fight, stacked their arms, and 
rested on their laurels. William H. Van Wagoner was little 
heard of after that. John B. Gough went into other lines of 
lecturing, and the temperance warfare ceased, and now the 
public mind is not so well educated on the subject as it was 
forty years ago. 

OUR FUTURE HOPE OF SUCCESS. 

A good cause is the first element of success. That we have. 
No cause could be more righteously founded. We cannot say 
the Christian religion is more important, because temperance is 
an important part of Christianity, without which no true Chris- 
tianity can exist. It is a fact that Gospel ministers should under- 
stand, that the use of alcoholic drinks, more than all other 
evils, predisposes the mind against the surrender of the heart to 
Christian influences. 

The next element of success must find its root in the hearts 
and souls of those who advocate our cause, the energy, the 
zeal, the fervor, ci7id the persistence of the friends of the 
cause. We need friends who will enlist during the war, not 
for a single campaign, but till the battle is won ; and after the 
battle is won, to see that it becomes a fixed reality. 
It is a pleasing thing to listen to the best speakers, those who 
can bring the learning, the intelligence, and the talent of the age 
in which we live. A few of the large towns may enjoy this ad- 
vantage. But, even in New York, not more than three per cent, 
of the entire population can hear them. How about the rural 
districts? The great masses of the people that CAN never 

HEAR SPEAKERS OF THAT CLASS. NEIGHBORHOOD WORK 

IS the effective work, where the people feel their own in- 
herent power, find their own hearts warming, their own pulse 
beating, anxious, and panting for the fray. 

The most successful political campaign ever carried on in 
this country was that which resulted in the election of William 
Henry Harrison. The log cabin, the coon skin, the 
hard cider, Tippecanoe and Tyler too were little in 
themselves, but each word was big with an idea, which meant 



reform, and meant work — work with a will, home work. 
Each neighborhood had its log cabin, where the people felt at 
home — OUR home. They had plenty of eloquent speakers — 
their own speakers — every one warmed up TO A white heat. 
Men who had thought as little about public speaking as of 
making an ascension to the moon, were brought on to the plat- 
form. It was in this way that Wm. H. Van Wagoner was dis- 
covered, as great a surprise to himself, as to any one else. From 
that night he was in demand all over the State as a stump 
speaker during the remainder of the campaign. 

After the close of the campaign he was no longer drunken 
Bill Van Wagoner, but the Poughkeepsie Blacksmith, 
shaking full houses with the thunder and lightning of his elo- 
quence, often in passages that would have done honor to the 
floor of the English House of Lords, or the United States Sen- 
ate. Alcohol never had so powerful a foe before nor since. 
Gough had more power to make the people laugh, but not half 
the power to make them think. 

The philosophy of that campaign still exists in the human 
soul, and can never die out so long as human nature endures 
with its normal instincts. 

Friends of Temperance : Awaken your enterprise and 
your zeal. Resolve to fight as long as the war lasts. Let 
nothing shake your courage nor your intrepid bravery. Let 
not one nor fifty Bull Runs discourage you. A hundred of 
them will not make one Waterloo. We had our Bull Run, 
but we had also our Gettysburg, our emancipation, and our 
saved and United Republic, over which the Stars and 
Stripes float more proudly than ever before, with popular free- 
dom redeemed from the stains of slavery. Take new courage. 
We shall yet see our glorious institutions flashing the light of 
freedom across the waters to the remotest parts of the earth, 
free from the stains and the chains of alcohol. 

This will be a third revolution, and a third independence ; 
without which all our past achievements will never shine with 
full lustre. 

We are not fighting for the hundreds of thousands who have 
fallen every year, nor for their broken-hearted fathers and 
mothers, nor their wretched and desolate widows, nor for their 
pauperized and ruined children. We are fighting for the mil- 
lions yet unborn — for the hundreds of thousands who will 
die each year, and fill our graveyards with CRUSHED AND 
blighted humanity. We are fighting to stop the re-echo- 
ings of orphans' cries, the flow of widows' tears, and the 
blighted hopes of fond parents. Ours is a work of sympathy, 
a work of love, a work of humanity, big with the future hopes 
of enlightened progress, and the final triumph of truth and 



8 

righteousness. This is a cause worthy of your loftiest aims, 
your most manly efforts, and your most fervent prayers. Let 
God and humanity be your watchword and your battle cry. 

If there is any cause in which politics may properly invoke 
the aid of religion, ours may claim the precedence. To protect 
the unprotected, to bind up the broken-hearted, to let the cap- 
tives go free from servile chains, is always God-like. There is 
nothing that pity can inspire, that sympathy can embrace, or 
that self-denying love can endure, that cannot be found in the 
temperance cause. The head, the heart, the soul, the spirit, 
can all find full employ in the temperance cause. It can employ 
every conceivable variety of character, every grade of talent, 
every degree of intelligence, and every age and station in life. 
The little child, the active youth, the strength of manhood, the 
wisdom of age, can all find pleasing employ. 

Those whose hardness and indifference will allow them to 
laugh with Democritus, the laughing philosopher, over the fol- 
lies of the drunkard, can find their bent fully gratified. But 
those whose sympathies incline them to weep with Heraclitus, 
the weeping philosopher, will find the fullest opportunity to 
sound the profoundest depths of human emotion. 

The philosopher who wishes to study the mysterious fascina- 
tions of temptation, and the tyranny of debasing habit, could not 
find a more fruitful field. 

However much the drunkard may deserve our censure in the 
beginnings of his folly, the frightful end must excite our com- 
miseration and humane pity. Resolution has failed, judgment 
is paralyzed, purposes more fleeting than if written in sand. 
Every faculty, every instinct and mental attribute sink into 
decay. Reason dethroned, and manhood crushed and blasted ! 

It is cruel to chide, suasion is powerless ; absolute control, or 
entire prohibition is all that can be done. Gentleness, kindness 
and positive affection are the last offices of the true Samaritan. 
We are often asked if we can really love such an object. I 
should be alarmed if I did not. I should know that some part 
of myself was either paralyzed or was never developed. It 
would shock me to be so unlike Jesus. While we were enemies 
to him, Christ died for us. While we were in full possession of 
all our faculties and fully responsible and yet vile, Divine love 
and mercy were still unabated. I hope the time will never come 
when I shall not be a faithful friend and loving brother to an 
unfortunate drunkard. The greater his need, the closer I would 
stick to him. Let prohibition never lose its soul, but, like the 
genial sun, never cease to beam its friendly influence on the 
frosted earth. To protect the innocent, restrain those who 
would injure, reclaim the fallen, and be a good Samaritan to the 
lost, should be our aim. 



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